Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Wikileaks

There's been a bit of a kerfuffle over the Wikileaks thing, hasn't there? Weeks of advance warning about how terrible it's all going to be and how the entire planet will self-destruct if anyone (outside of the three million people who already had access) got to read the leaked 'cables'. (Are they really 'cables'? Do we still have those?)

When they finally get here, we find they are the equivalent of YouTube comments by diplomats and just about as earth-shattering. Some countries don't get along. Sometimes, in order to get their own way, people say one thing and do another. The Royal Family smells of elderberries. That kind of thing.

In fact, Dull Cables Are Dull, so much so that there almost seems something fishy about it. I was expecting the Conspiracy Freaks who write to me on a daily basis to start saying Wikileaks is a disinformation campaign approximately tomorrow, but I was wrong. There was a link in my email on Tuesday morning. I just hadn't gotten around to opening it.

(Of course, mentioning Israel is the diagnostic sign of a conspiracy theorist. But still, the guy has some good points.)

So, thanks to Wiki-leaks, the unlikely darling of the mainstream media, the world is being informed that the 'enemy' in Afghanistan is growing stronger, Pakistan and Iran are to blame, and brave US troops are engaged in 'reconstruction' there!

But Pakistan and the Taliban are not the main target of disinformation in these documents. As more documents are released, it becomes clear that, sitting square in the bulls-eye, is Iran.[...] Only in their wildest dreams could the war-mongers in Washington and Tel Aviv have wished for a more on-message leak of 'secret information'.[...]Is there no one in the alternative news community that can see this for what it is? North Korea supplying missiles to Iran to attack Europe?! Right when the US and Israel are involved in a protracted effort to demonize Iran to the world and the US has an aircraft carrier sitting off the Korean Coast!? Is all of this meant to be so obvious, or did my reading of 'psychological operations for dummies' gift me with amazing insight into how political propaganda really works?

The person who sent the link to me pointed out that last week, the Department of Homeland Security shut down the domain names of about 70 file-sharing websites, without warrants or court orders. They just grabbed the sites and took them down. If Wikileaks was an actual threat, they'd have taken that site down too. Assange had been crowing for a while that this release was coming up, and the government walked around wringing its hands about it. They didn't shut it down, so what does that suggest?

And if the several million 'cables' are actually true, unaltered and unfiltered...well, whenever the American government wants to curtail its citizens' freedoms, such as by following us around cyberspace, tapping our phones or peering at our naked bodies in airports, there's always a herd of people who swallow their cud in order to say, "If you haven't done anything wrong you don't have anything to worry about!"

1 comment:

Two Israelis are sitting on the beach in Tel Aviv, reading. One has got a quality newspaper, the other an antisemitic rag. "Why on earth are you reading that?" one asks. "I used to read a quality paper like you," the other sighs, "but I couldn't handle it any more – the rockets from Gaza and Hezbollah getting stronger every day and the Iranian nuclear programme and the suffering economy and growing antisemitism across Europe…" He points to the antisemitic rag. "Now I read this and I feel much better. Turns out there's actually a Jewish global conspiracy and we control the entire world."

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I share a house with a bunch of geckos, a chameleon and approximately seven goldfish. The largest and dumbest goldfish is called John Galt. I can't remember why. Friend me on LiveJournal here. Friend me on Facebook here.